Ministering in weakness: the power of story

In a recent sermon our minister, Rev Duncan Macpherson of Hilton Church Inverness described a recent experience of burnout, and his gratitude to God for rescuing him when he was ‘in a pit, sprachling about in the mud and mire.’

He was preaching on Psalm 40 – a testimony from many centuries ago of God’s rescuing intervention. Using the words of the Psalm, Duncan says that God ‘set my feet on a rock and gave me a firm place to stand.’

He described the extreme tiredness which crept over him in August 2012, a tiredness which neither holiday nor rest could lift. Unable to sleep, battling constant exhaustion, barely able to walk. It seemed his ministry might be over. ‘Is there a way through this, or am I destined to stay in this pit of exhaustion and tiredness for ever?’

He described the agonised questioning (‘Where is God in this?); the anger he felt at himself and others; the self-reproach.

And he told us how, like the author of the Psalm, he grew aware that God was with him as he slowly journeyed back to health, and realised that the richest treasures are often found in life’s dark places.

To stand up and be as real and vulnerable as Duncan was as he described this painful journey takes both bravery and humility. Duncan shared as he did for two reasons. Firstly, to encourage those of us who are currently struggling in dark places (and which of us is immune from times of darkness?): we are not alone; God is with us in our pain, and therefore, hope remains.

And secondly, to demonstrate that there is unique power in a personal story, honestly shared in spoken or written words or in whatever ways of sharing come naturally to us.  Psalm 40 has blessed and encouraged God’s friends across the centuries. Today our stories bless and encourage those around us. As Henri Nouwen put it ‘we minister above all with our weakness.’

The better we know and understand the true significance of our stories, the more real and therefore powerful our sharing becomes. Gaining this discernment is harder than it seems. We re-shape our personal stories as we get older, to present ourselves in ways we are comfortable with.  But which version of is truest?

And some of us tell, and try to live out of stories which are not genuinely ‘us’. I may model my life on what I believe others expect of me; what I think I ‘ought’ to be; what I assume the false hard-taskmaster image of God I carry in my heart demands of me.

I suspect Duncan’s telling of his story would have been very different before his Psalm 40 experience – he mentioned his lack of awareness of what an over-busy life was doing to him, hinting that he was blind to powerful drives hounding him to self-destruction.

Before I can tell my story authentically I need to hear that story. I discover my identity and my story as I listen to my deepest self. For there, beneath all the storms of guilt and delusion whispers the voice saying ‘This is who you are! This is the path I have for you to follow.’

And once I have heard that voice - I believe it’s the voice of God -  I realise I’m free to choose to be who I am called to be; to choose the story I am called to live. And it’s not easy for some of us to choose – the dark place can become so familiar that the freedom on offer seems risky and scary.

Duncan chose freedom: adopting a less pressured lifestyle; concentrating on things he alone can do, and leaving the rest to others,; drawing inspiration daily from other struggling pilgrims in the Psalms.

It’s important not just to discern and then to share our own stories, but to listen to other people’s stories as we’d like them to listen to ours – non-judgementally;  open and attentive. Some will speak of finding God in the darkness, other of feeling abandoned by God and of abandoning faith in return.

And we listen, and we wait, as a faithful friend listened to and waited with Duncan during his months of darkness, and as Duncan now makes space to journey with others.

All our stories are provisional, and will be fully understood only when we meet the great Storyteller in another place.

Duncan's conclusion had authenticity and power because of what we'd heard earlier. This was not a theoretical statement of belied, but a dsipatch from the front line. 'I can stand here this morning and say 'God is good.' We worship the God who hears our cries, who lifts us up, who gives us a new song to sing. 

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 8th July 2015)

A dayspring from on high

A couple of Sunday ago at Hilton Church in Inverness we were delighted to have the minister, Duncan Macpherson back preaching after several months of absence due to ill-health. Duncan’s sermon was fresh and powerful.

It was Good Shepherd Sunday in the Church Calendar, and Duncan reflected on Jesus’ words in St John’s Gospel about being the Good Shepherd, leading and protecting a ‘flock’ comprised of all who have entrusted themselves to him. ‘My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me.’

Duncan also discussed the context of those words  - Jesus was attending the Feast of Dedication in the Temple at Jerusalem, also known as Hanukkah. By the end of the eight-day festival, celebrating the restoration of the Temple in around 160 BC after it had been desecrated by the Seleucid Empire, eight candles one lit each day of the celebration burned brightly, a symbol of light’s power to overcome darkness.

The Good Shepherd story. It’s summer. The shepherd leads his flock across grassy field, beside the singing stream’s cool waters. The sheep hear his voice. It’s a picture of the joy of Christian faith, when you know for a certainty that God is there and utterly reliable. You know you are loved. The words of the Bible speak peace.

That Sunday we also sang the old hymn O love that will not let me go. It was written by the blind Church of Scotland minister Rev George Matheson in his manse at Innellan on the Clyde on 6th June 1882 after an undisclosed experience had, he said ‘caused me the most severe mental suffering.’

The hymn is the fruit of suffering, its subject faith in time of suffering. The words came from somewhere very deep in Matheson, or else were given from beyond him. The hymn came ‘like a dayspring from on high.’

Our atheist friends suggest we’re deceiving ourselves with our picture of shepherd and sheep. What truly good shepherd, they say, would lead his sheep into the bleakness of faith’s winter?

Yet Matheson wrote from a place of suffering of the love of God from which nothing can separate us, the love which, despite appearances, never lets us go. The line of the hymn which most spoke to me, years ago, when I was struggling with sadness, was ‘O Joy that seekest me through pain.’

The line has two levels of meaning. The Joy which is God seeks to penetrate our pain, so that we catch glimpses of Joy, like you see the sun’s bright circle through a swirling mist before a denser fog hides it once again.

But the words also suggest that pain can be a vehicle through which God comes to us, as if our hurt and depression sweeps aside all which distances us from God. The beauty of the rainbow is seen only after the storm.

These glimpses energise us to live in the light of a joy which for the moment we don’t feel.

The hymn also explores the surrender of self to God. Matheson writes about giving back to God the light he has been given, in order to live more radiantly, about relinquishing his life in order to live more fully.

Is this another example of faith’s madness in an age when we emphasise the need to find ourselves, to be ourselves, to affirm ourselves. Yet many of us hand ourselves over to other people’s ideas of what we should be like; we let culture, or friends, or lovers, or advertisers, or religious systems shape our identities. And sometimes we hand ourselves over to the pursuit of our own mistaken dreams.

I write as someone who has barely started the journey, but it seems to me that when we yield ourselves to anything other than God, we are diminished but conversely when we allow God to live through us we increasingly realise our unique potential.

But what about those times of storm when Joy seems not to reach us, when no sun is glimpsed through the mist, no rainbow, when all is midnight darkness?

American poet and cancer patient Christian Wiman describes this experience: ‘God has given me courage in the past – I have felt palpably lifted beyond my own ability to respond or react. But this most recent time in hospital, when the cancer had become so much more aggressive and it seemed for a time as if I’d reached the end of my options, I felt only death.’

Can we still believe that the one whose joyful, weather-beaten face reflected the glorious light of  eight Hanukkah candles stands in the darkness with us, and that because of his presence we will know in this world, or if not in the dimension beyond ‘a dayspring from on high?’

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 2nd May 2013)